Neya Systems has been awarded a Phase I SBIR by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (Topic OSD13-HS4) to develop software tool to rapidly and rigorously evaluate the performance of perception and autonomy algorithms for unmanned systems.

Under this Phase I SBIR, Neya will be extending work done under prior Army and DHS SBIR efforts to combine our mission planning toolkits with our perception development suite. UxPress (Unmanned Systems PeRception Evaluation and Simulation System) will, when completed, include the ability to develop single and multi-vehicle unmanned systems mission that rely on on-board or payload-based perception, simulate those mission, and collect metrics on mission performance centered around the robustness of integrated perception capabilities.

“TEV&V is a growing challenge within DoD, as autonomy capabilities continue to mature and move towards deployment. UxPress provides a modular, mission-centric test and evaluation framework to address one of the hardest problems in autonomy, that of robust and reliable outdoor perception”, said Dr. Parag Batavia, president of Neya Systems.

UxPress is based on Neya’s Mission Planning and Management System, and as such, will provide both mission simulation and mission execution capabilities in one package. This allows an evaluator to set up mission scenarios with one or more UxVs, simulate their performance, and then verify that performance on real-world platform.

Under this Phase I, Neya will be concentrating on extending MPMS to integrate technology developed under a separate DHS-funded SBIR to integrate common perception APIs, develop visualization tools for perception and unmanned systems metrics, and demonstrate how UxPress can be used to rapidly evaluate a set of perception algorithms on a single mission.

UxPress will be compliant with the RS-JPO Interoperability Profile (IOP) V1 and upgraded to V2 when V2 is released.

About the Author

Parag Batavia is the founder and president of Neya Systems, LLC. He started Neya in 2009, in order to further robotics R&D efforts, and transition them to commercial and DoD product areas. Parag has a Ph.D. in Robotics from CMU, and an MBA from Drexel. He is married, with two beautiful little girls, and is slowly trying to get back in shape now that he's hit the big 40.

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Neya Systems LLC, a division of Applied Research Associates, is a Pittsburgh-area robotics company and a leading developer of advanced unmanned systems and off-road autonomy/self-driving vehicle technologies. We work with commercial, defense, and homeland security customers to deliver novel solutions to some of the hardest problems related to autonomy, computer vision, and general unmanned systems development and deployment.